Thursday

A vegetative state is a clinical condition that usually refers to patients who have a severe dysfunction of their cerebral hemispheres, resulting in a loss of conscious responses, hence the term vegetative. Well, it turns out we may soon need to update our lexicon as this expression is kind of an insult to plants. Yes, that is because a new scientific study has revealed that plants actually exhibit decision-making behaviors when they are faced with competition.

Monday

With the cyptocurrency market literally exploding every day, the world is steadily moving towards decentralization in almost every aspect of our lives. This decentralization trend is so strong it is affecting domains that were previously exclusively reserved for experts and official institutions. For example, in recent years, we have seen a surge in citizen science projets that aim to empower ordinary citizens by given them an opportunity to contribute to scientific advancements. Citizen science projects range from identifying exoplanets (e.g., Planet Hunters), to bug hunting. Yes, if you have seen an invasive bug and want to help scientists build a system that predicts pests' movements, you can do that at the Big Bug Hunt Project's page. Going back to the actual topic of this article, MIT's physicists have created a muon particle detector that anyone can build using affordable common electronic parts.

Saturday

When we try to picture what an alien living on Kepler-452b might look like, the first image that comes to our mind is that of a greenish creature with shiny big eyes and a giant brain. However, this impression is about to change as a new scientific study from the University of Oxford has shown that aliens might in fact be more similar to us than we think.

Tuesday

While the Kepler space telescope's data collecting ability was severely handicapped by the failure of two of its four reaction wheels on July 14 2012 and May 11 2013 respectively, it has certainly revolutionized the search for exoplanets with its discovery of more than 2300 confirmed exoplanets and another 4,496 unconfirmed alien worlds.

A new analysis of Kepler's data collected in its first few operational years preceding the wheel accident, has revealed the existence of 20 potential exoplanets that may actually be able to harbor alien life.

Monday

Fish getting emotional and fruit flies having primitive internal emotions? If this isn't enough to give you a braingasm, then how about bacteria that possess a sense of touch? Yes, you are not reading a science fiction book, because a research team led by Prof. Urs Jenal at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, has discovered that bacteria are actually capable of sensing their environment!

Sunday

"The things we do for science" might be the standard Jaime Lannister-like response one would get upon asking the team members behind this research about their unconventional approach to studying dolphin sex.
Researchers at Dalhousie, Massachusetts and Tufts Universities have used an artificially erected dead dolphin penis (i.e., an artificial dead boner so to speak) to understand how these cetaceans mate in the wild.

Saturday

We all were exposed to a situation where our excuses for not showing up for a party or a meeting seemed fishy to the others. Although the term "fishy" bears a negative meaning in most cases since it likely originated from the fact that fish are slippery and smell bad after a while, things might change after a recent scientific study showed that fish get in fact emotional, just like humans do. Well, sort of!

Thursday

Molecular robots that build and assemble molecules? Check. Micro-robots that are capable of flying, swimming, diving and breaking out of water? Check. As science and technology continue to delve into the "Nanoland" realm, it stands to reason that the micro-machine tendency will only keep solidifying as more and more scientific researches try to explore the micro-world.
In what appears to be a natural consequence of this trend, a team of scientists from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering at Harvard, managed to create a RoboBee that is capable of flying, swimming, and flying again after diving out of water.

Tuesday

When it comes to the art of attracting females, insects often go to extreme lengths to secure a mate. As we have seen in the previous post, water boatman males make the loudest noise in the animal kingdom relative to their body size. Another example of sophisticated courtship endeavor seen in insects is that of a moth commonly found in south-east Asia as well as in northern Australia.

Males of the Creatonotos Gangis moth species have four tentacle-like body parts whose role is to attract females by emitting pheromones.

Monday

Thinking like an insect might sound like an insult to a creature that possesses one of the most sophisticated eyes in the animal kingdom: That is what most people would think after reading this post's title. However, being able to learn and remember things like insects do is actually a good thing for the mantis shrimp.

A new scientific study, which was published in eLife on September 26 2017, uncovered that the brains of mantis shrimps contain learning and memory centers that so far have been observed only in insects.

Thursday

One of the most fascinating attributes of science is that it keeps challenging our understandings of the universe as new ideas and concepts are constantly being introduced either to refine already existing theories or to dismiss past knowledge and build new notions from scratch. While this variable nature of science is often what makes it what it is, it can also render it a killjoy to some people, especially when it comes to debunking imaginative alien theories.

This is exactly what NASA did to the alien megastructure theory, which explains the atypical dimming of Tabby's star as a consequence of a giant technological creation built by an advanced civilization to harvest the star's energy.

Tuesday

Next time you are checking on your zombie apocalypse survival kit to make sure you are prepared for what is to come, sneaking in a bottle of your tears might be as crucial as your typical knife set. Well, sort of!

Irish scientists have figured out a method to generate electricity using a protein that can found in tears and even egg whites.

Saturday

"Does size matter?", We all came across this question in one form or another to the point that it became almost a synonym for the word cliché. While humans, in general, give ambiguous and often different answers to this question, ducks' response to this query is a flat out "yes". A new scientific study has revealed that, when forced to compete for females, the dominant male ducks of certain species develop a very long penis, while the weaker ones grow nothing whatsoever!

Wednesday

In what can be considered a crucial step towards reaching the ultima Thule of computing, scientists from Oxford, Münster and Exeter Universities, have developed microships that mimic the the human brain by combining computing and memory into a single unit.

Tuesday

Next time your phone runs out of battery in the middle of nowhere while you are desperately trying to send that tweet that will change the world, the solution might be as easy as wearing a solar thermoelectric device that generates energy simply by being attached to clothes, walls or even windows!

Sunday

As William Gibson once put it, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed", science has been blurring the boundaries between the present and the future for quite some time. In case you ever need to prove this statement to someone, take this: scientists at The University of Manchester have built the first of its kind "molecular robot" that is capable of carrying out a set of simple tasks including building other molecules.

Monday

If you previously thought that jumping spiders used only six of their eight legs to walk, you might need to reconsider. A new "breakthrough" scientific paper published in in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that, contrary to what was previously thought, the ant mimicking spiders actually don't walk on six legs in an attempt to trick the predators into thinking they look like an ant, but rather they walk on all their eight legs with a tricky catch.

Friday

The Cassini spacecraft has just sent its farewell gift to NASA's scientists after venturing into Saturn's atmosphere early Friday morning. The gift came in the form of a set of images the probe took before performing a suicidal dive into the ringy planet.

Sunday

Next time someone treats you to a smallmouth bass meal, bear in mind that you may actually be taking medications WITHOUT you even noticing. A new scientific study has unveiled that human antidepressants are accumulating in the brains of bass, walleye and several other fish species that inhabit the Niagara River in the Great Lakes region.